An expert on video game piracy has claimed that new software protection is becoming so advanced that in a few years piracy will cease to be practical for new games.

Website TorrentFreak translated comments from the founder of infamous Chinese forum 3DM, which is apparently still struggling to break the Denuvo security used for recent release Just Cause 3.

As the site explains, the length of time it tacks groups to ‘crack’ a new game has been steadily increasing, and instances of pirated versions of games being available to download before they’re officially released is now increasingly rare.

An earlier version of Denuvo meant it was a month before 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was cracked and it’s kept FIFA 16 safe for coming on four months now.

‘I still believe that this game can be compromised’, said 3DM forum founder ‘Bird Sister’ of Just Cause 3. ‘But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world’.

From her perspective this was framed as a bad thing, but it will be music to publishers’ ears – especially given the losing battle that the movie and music industry seems to be fighting over piracy.

Denuvo is expensive to licence, and is not used in all games, but the increasingly online nature of modern games also makes them naturally resistant to piracy. Being based in China, 3DM is focused on PC gaming but there’s still no viable piracy option for any of the current generation consoles.

Recent efforts to get the Linux operating system running on PlayStation 4 proves there are vulnerabilities, but compared to the PlayStation 1 and 2 era piracy is now a vastly more complicated and difficult process for both the hackers and ordinary users.